Once back at work, my usual blogging time on the train trip to and from work disappeared, as my MacBook Pro died and I started riding to work more often.

I need to start blogging on a more regular basis, I looked at what I do on a regular basis and are passionate about. Food, cycling and web development and decided that I should try and blog more about what you can get for lunch under $10AUD. For those that don’t know me that well, I work in Northbridge, Perth’s Chinatown with probably 100 restaurants within 3 blocks, I enjoy lunch it is my big meal of the day and while I am watching what I eat, I have managed to lose 9kg in 11 weeks. Mainly through consuming 2500 calories on active days that I burn over 3500 calories. The big surprise for those who do know me is that after 15 years, I have started eating meat again.

So hopefully you should start seeing more regularly posts about things I am passionate about, food, cycling and web development.

As I have only worked 50 of the last 100 days, this blog should be full of interesting posts on CSS and other web geekery. Instead nothing, why?

• Most of my blog posts are written on the train to and from work. Working less and cycling more has reduced this time from five hours a week to less than two.
• Work often provides inspiration for posts, however, instead of working with HTML, CSS or web 2.0, I have been working with JavaScript, jQuery and the intricacies of MySource Matrix workflows. While this keeps me busy, it is not pushing any boundaries or providing material to blog about.
• I am spending more time on my other passion, cycling, including acquiring a couple of project bikes to build. While I am happy and confident in my web mechanic skills to blog about building anything web related. My bicycle mechanic skills are limited and I rather not exposed them to the everybody.

So what does this future hold for this blog, well until I my interest in CSS, HTML and web 2.0 topics is fired up, you will see a few cycling related posts. Most will be reviews of cycling related products (I have a couple of c
Crumpler bags to review) as well as some progress reports on my project bikes. It will not be another 100 days of silence.

So Duncan thank you for the plug. I did not expect this to happen, when I added my two RSS feeds to Duncan&38217;s FriendFeed post, requesting blog post feeds of his friends and friends of friends. I might be shameless self promoter, but not on this scale.

So if you are reading my blog for the first time, welcome. I will try to post more regularly, though I have made that promise before. At the moment I tend to write about social networks, because that is what I am interested in as well as well as front end web development.

]]> http://nickcowie.com/2008/blog-has-been-pimpe/feed/ 0 http://nickcowie.com/2008/journalists-vs-bloggers/ http://nickcowie.com/2008/journalists-vs-bloggers/#comments Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:07:29 +0000 Nick http://nickcowie.com/?p=253 The underlying themes of the recent Future of Media and PubCamp seem to be Journalists vs Bloggers as ilustrated by posts by Stephen, Stilgherrian and others.

Seriously old media types, this story is over 10 years old. New media has been making inroads in old media well before then.

Up until the beginning of this year, I was using Bloglines as my feed reader. I had experimented with a number of online feed readers, including Google Reader, but I stuck with Bloglines because I preferred it’s interface, despite it’s shortcomings. And I needed an online feed reader as I used different devices to read feeds.

Then Newsgator started giving it’s feed readers away and they could synchronise with Newsgator Online. So I quickly installed Feed Demon on my work and home PC, NetNewsWire on my Mac and NewsGator Go on my mobile. Despite different UI for different devices, I was relatively happy until Feedly was released to coincide with the release of FireFox 3.

Feedly is not a huge step forward in feed reading UI, I am still coming to grips with the magazine influenced layout. It is not available for my mobile, so I am having to go back to Google Reader for the mobile. The big change is feed recommendations. That was available already with Google Reader, but only for people whose email was in my Gmail address book.

Feedly goes beyond that small circle, adding all my friends on Twitter or FriendFeed who use Google Reader and then providing recommendations from their friends. I am now getting recommendations from a couple hundred of people.

So that is why I am now I huge fan of Feedly and are not going back, recommendations. At some stage, I would like to be able to block some friends of friends, I have some strange friends and they have even stranger friends who read really weird feeds.

So make you feed reading more social by checking out Feedly and if you do and your are not one of my Twitter or FriendFeeds friends, you will have to wait a couple of weeks to see what strange feeds my friends read.

This got me thinking about my views I expressed in Twitter, Plurk and FriendFeed as discussion tools, and my experience with conversation on the web over time. So here is a potted history of my history with conversation on the web. Note I was a late starter, not starting using the web until 1993.

Web 0.5 c1995

Back in the good/bad old days of the web the main place conversation was happening on was email, either on lists or amongst individuals. A web page might spark the conversation, but the conversation would usually take place in the relative privacy of email, because that was were the community was. Some list archives where open, but not all, and some of the most of the interesting conversation took place between individuals and quite often offline.

Not all conversations, took place in closed environment. Back then I use to contribute to a local music webzine, for your newcomers to the web, it was basically a blog published weekly which had a basic commenting system called a guestbook which covered the whole site. I had conversation with a friend on the guestbook about a review I written. That evening I walked into a bar to see a band and bumped into a couple of other friends. One who said “We where just talking about the discussion you where having on the website and …”. Which is a good example of conversations going well beyond the original source.

What surprised me at the time was the two friends in the bar, were the two most powerful people in the local music industry at the time (a record company exec and the editor of the local music print mag) and they were interested in a conversation between two fans. That night I learnt that conversations in the open online had a much bigger impact than offline conversation and could start conversation in other places. I had seen the future of the web.

Web 1.0 c2000

While a lot of conversation was still happening on email and some had switched to IM. Forums had become popular, and more conversations were happening in this more open environment, because communities where developing around these forums.

This was the start of the centralisation of comments. A web page might spark a conversation, the discussion would take place on one or more forums, where there was a community. The problem was that discussion were separate from the original source and a lack of tools made it difficult for the original author to find any conversations they started unless they were members of the community.

Web 1.5 c2004

With the advent of blogs, conversations took place on that blog or on a series of blogs as long as there was a community around the blog/s. However, if there was a strong community outside of the blog, such as a forum you would often find conversations taking place there.

Web 2.0 c2008

The communities are moving on, no longer do people visit blogs to read posts, they use RSS. As people no longer visit blogs, the conversation now takes place in the community where they are in. Which is now Twitter, FriendFeed and other social network services.

The future

As the web evolves and develops, conversation will always occur in the communities. Authors will no longer have the conversation occurring right in front of them on their blog, because the community that existed has moved on. However there are a range of tools for authors to keep track of the conversations they started (ie summize), unlike the good old days. Still the best way to be part of the conversation is to be involved in the community.

Twitter

You only carry out conversations, with your friends. If one of your friends replies and on of their friends (but not one of your friends) joins the discussion, you miss part of the conversation and it becomes fractured. The only way to stay on top of this, is if good Twitter etiquette occur with lots of @ and you follow this up adding new people as friends.

This a great way of finding friends with similar interests, but it can be a lot of work. And once you start following people this generates a great deal of noise. Particularly when your friends are talking to their friends who are not your friends.

Another one of the disadvantages of twitter, depending on your number of friends, that unless conversations are tagged with #something, it is difficult to follow conversations and if you leave even for short period of time, you are lost.

Plurk

If you start the conversation it is carried out with your friends, if somebody else starts, you are part of a discussion with their friends, which may or may not be your friends. If you want your all friends involved, you either start the conversation again with them or convince them to become friends of the other friend.

The big advantage of Plurk is that conversations are threaded, you can go have lunch come back and get right back into the conversation.

FriendFeed

You start a conversation, if a friend joins it, it becomes available to their friends. If friends of friends join in, then it becomes available to their friends. So if you start a truly engaging conversation it wil expand well beyond your circle of friends. The downside is there is a lot of noise,

The conversation is threaded, so you can leave for a short period of time, you do not miss anything.

What I do

So what do I with 190 Twitter friends, 55 Plurk friends and 45 friends on FriendFeed. I used Twhirl to connect to Twitter and FriendFeed and keep it open, when I am on the computer which is most of the day every day. I will visit Plurk site a few times a day, more often if there is an interesting conversation, less if I am busy. Other social networking services, I am lucky to vist once a day.

The future

Personally, I do know who much longer I will keeping using Plurk. It is a good service to carry out conversations with a closed group of friends. The lack of a desktop application is hurting, as does not knowing if you are talking to your all friends when you comment on another friend#&8217;s post.

Twitter, I will keep using even given the recent problems. I have close to 200 friends and find it a great service to exchange small pieces of information.

FriendFeed, I am finding this service more and more useful, both for conversation and information discovery and it appears to be evolving. The desktop apps and there are number of them and the ability to hide conversations or services (only on the FF website) make FriendFeed so usable.

Find Me On

The easy way to find me on the social networking services I regularly use.

Add a comment on FriendFeed

I am using FriendFeed more and more, and this is a way of capturing comments there and to let people who use FriendFeed comment here.

FeedBurner

When I set this blog up three years ago, I set up a FeedBurner account, but after reading their terms and conditions at the time and not understanding their revenue model, I did not make use of the service. With hindsight it would of been great to use them and have feed statistics. However, now the features of a FeedBurner feeds give me good reason to use then.

The title might sound like linkbait, picking on some of the new darlings of social networking, but my question is should we be the services using them in combination, flooding the channels with a lot of noise and little chance of conversation.

Tools like Hellotxt and Ping.fm allow you to post to a number of different mircoblogging services like Twitter, Plurk, BrightKite and Tumblr as well update your status on social network sites like FaceBook and MySpace. While I think they might be okay for a quick update of your status on a small number of sites. Posting to a number of services is creating a lot of noise and destroying any chance of a discussion.

The problem, if like me, you are a member of number of theses sites, you could use a tool to post your discussion starter to a number of services, which can fracture any resulting conversation. If for example you post an idea via ping.fm to Plurk, Twitter, BrightKite and Jaiku and it then feeds into your Friendfeed via Twitter and Jakiu, where do your friends reply? Especially if you have a slightly different group of friends on the different networks.

The end result is a fractured discussion which is not likely to become interesting or compeling enough for people to join in, because their are a couple of replies in Twitter, another couple in Plurk and another couple in FriendFeed. If all six replies ended on one services, the chances of more replies and generating a real conversation are more likely.

So what service should I use and when? That is a question I am working through now, so more soon.

For those who haven’t heard about the 8 things meme yet:

The rules :

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. List EIGHT random facts about yourself.
3. Tag EIGHT people at the end of your post and list their names.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Here are eight things you probably didn’t know about me:

1. I got introduced to hexadecimal at the age of 10 by two computer boffins (hey it was 1971 and anybody used computers was a boffin). The boffins where at a quiet career night with a computerised mathematical quiz. They decided to show a precious 10 year old that you could answer in decimal or hexadecimal. Which went really well for five minutes, until the 10 year typed in “please can I have harder questions” and I crashed my first computer.
2. I went to high school with Gary aka Tuna aka Man with No Blog. His stream got to do computer programming aka playing with punch cards, I got to do advanced cooking as the only boy in a class of 20 girls instead.
3. The closest I ever got to any training in graphic design was helping my sister with her assignments while she was studying graphic design in return for help in typing my assignments for my degree in psychology.
4. I suffered brain damage as the result of a car doing a uturn in front of my moving motorcycle. I have seen the scans my brain is not a pretty sight, there is roughly 10 to 20% that does not work.
5. I have an exceptional good memory though I do not always show it with words or names. It got me through school and university. I was worried that brain damage was affecting my memory, so I got tested twice after the accident. I was off the scale both times (top 0.1% of population). I freaked out the psychologist who did the tests, by saying I remembered the questions from the intelligence test twelve months earlier, so I googled the answers before attending the second test.
6. If you are not carefully, I will make appearance on your tv via Rage late at night. I had roles in two Jebediah film clips, Jerks of Attention and Teflon. I am the guy with the bright red hair, leather pants and chained to a sink.
7. Nickobec which is my username on a lot of forums, came about because I needed an yahoo email address a long time ago when it was limited to 8 characters and nick@yahoo.com was taken, so instead of nick17 which was suggested by Yahoo, I choose nickobec because that was the username I was given for an online FBPro football league I was playing at the time. First four characters of my name, plus four character team moniker for my team the Oberlin Coyotes. My town was chosen based on the record of the Oberlin College football team, which at that stage was 44 game losing streak (a US college record). I started using nickobec in forums whenever nick was already taken. who said I could count ;-)
8. I do play computer games, but I stick to older ones, I have spent a lot of time playing the original Civilization. Still have not been able to conquer the world, with six other civilizations at the emperor level before 800AD.
9. Like most of the Perth Port80 Posse I am addicted to Five Senses Coffee. Burton’s Blend is my favourite.

Normally I don’t like tagging people in memes, so this is a clayton’s tag, ignore it, unless you feel the need. Except for Sarah, you need to blog. So in no particular order:

• Sarah just to add to the pressure to get her to post to her blog for the first time in a while.
• Raena has rebooted her blog (cleaned of the old content) and here is the chance to add new content.
• Miles because there are some really unusual random facts about Miles that he let slip during late night socialising session, that need to published.
• Kay I just want to find out about the goatlady moniker.
• Myles aka Madpilot I want to find the origin of Madpilot.
• Bronwen because Browen will beat me up if she missed out ;-)
• You, because I never know enough about the people who regularly read this blog.

And I know that is only seven, but sometimes I just feel the need to break the rules.

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